Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Student tied tourniquet to survive
Hit twice in the leg while holding a door shut, Kevin Sterne used an electrical cord to stop the bleeding.
Alan Kim | The Roanoke Times
Authorities carry student Kevin Sterne out of Norris Hall on Monday. Sterne and three other students held a classroom door shut against shooter Cho Seung-Hui, who fired at it anyway.
They could hear him coming.
Wearing a black leather jacket and a maroon hat, the man police say was responsible for Monday’s massacre, Cho Seung-Hui, was prowling Virginia Tech’s Norris Hall. He’d chained two doors to keep people from getting out. Now Cho was using a pair of semiautomatic handguns, a 9 mm Glock and a .22-caliber Walther, to shoot students and professors.
As they heard the gunshots coming closer to their classroom on the second floor of Norris, students Katelyn Carney, Kevin Sterne and two other s threw themselves against the door. They stayed close to the floor, trying to hold the door shut. Sterne is a big guy, about 6-foot-2, so when Cho tried the door, it wouldn’t budge.
He moved down the hall.
There was more shooting.
Cho came back. He tried to force the door open.
He still couldn’t get in, So he shot at the doorknob.
Carney was hit in her left hand.
Sterne had more serious problems.
The senior, due to graduate May 11, had been shot twice in the right leg.
One bullet went straight through. A fragment of the second lodged in his femur. On the way in, it took a chunk out of an artery. If no one did anything, it wouldn’t be long before Sterne bled to death.
So Sterne got an electrical cord and tied it around his thigh.
That stopped the bleeding until police carried Sterne from the building and emergency medical technicians put a proper tourniquet on him. Roanoke Times photographer Alan Kim caught the moment in a picture that’s now gone around the world.
“He was an Eagle Scout,” said David Stoeckle, chief of surgery at Montgomery Regional Hospital. “Without him taking care of himself ... I think there’s a good chance he would have died.”
Stoeckle, who operated on Sterne, said the young man is doing well, though he may be in the hospital for some time. The bullet fragment is still in his leg.
As for the other two students with Carney and Sterne, their fate was unclear.
The Norris Hall incident was described to reporters Tuesday by Carney’s mother, Sterne’s mother and Stoeckle at Montgomery Regional Hospital.
